Man Versus Flea; Man Wins High Jump

Northern Advocate, 22 March 1937, Page 10

Man Versus Flea; Man Wins High Jump

If a flea makes a long jump of 13 inches, reaching a height of 7* inches, how far would the insect jump if it were the size of a man? asks the “News Chronicle.” If a man were as good a jumper as a flea, what should the present long jump record be. It is now 26ft Bjin. Don’t take pencil and paper and start to do intricate calculations. Whatever figure you arrive at, the answer will be wrong. From the Victorian age we have inherited a mistaken idea that the 13-inch-long jump of the flea is equal to a 300-yard jump of a 6-foot man. Air Resistance, Eminent scientists and zoologists like Dr George P. Bidder (in a letter to the “Times”) and Professor Julian Huxley are ready to kill the fallacy. Early naturalists studied the flea, marvelled that-The tiny insect could jump so far, but forgot, when making comparisons, such questions as weight and the resistance to the air of increased body surfaces.

Dr Bidder says that the height and distance which animals can jump is not proportional to their length of body. The ordinary flea weighs only part of a grain. If it had twice the length it

would have four times the body surface and eight times the weight. The weight behind each square hundredth of an inch of skin would be twice as much as that of the smaller flea. Because there is little air resistance to its tiny body, the flea can make its long jump; but the distance which other insects and animals can leap is governed by the weight behind each unit of skin area.

Prize To Man

If a man’s body is 800 times loffger than that of the flea, it does not follow that he should be able to jump 800 times as far.

Dr Bidder and Professor Julian Huxley agree that the height which man and the larger animals can jump is approximately the same as the length of their bodies. These scientists give the prize for leaping or jumping to man and not the flea. If the flea could jump about in a vacuum it would win, but as both man and flea have to share the atmosphere man wins. Man, says Dr Bidder, is ten times the better jumper, because man weighs 91b for each square foot of body surface, against the flea’s 1.891 b per square foot of surface. For the purpose of practical comparison and example, man becomes a 5-inch cube -of stone, and the flea a square of writing paper weighing 89 sheets to the lb.

Man jhmps 10 times higher than the flea for the same natural causes which enables the cube to be thrown 10 times further than the' sheet of paper, even when folded into a dart.